1. Long conversion funnel

Every marketing campaign has a goal. Whether your goal is to generate leads or brand awareness, you may want to think about the series of steps that your target audience should take to achieve your goal.

For example, if your goal is to generate leads, you may want your target audience to provide their contact details or download your product or service brochure. Here is a possible series of steps that you may want your target audience to take in order to reach the goal:

Landing on your website

Visiting the products or services page

Selecting the specific product or service they are interested in and viewing the details

Scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the download brochure button

Filling in a form with their contact details and submitting it

Arriving on a page where they can download the brochure

​Do you notice any problem with the series of steps above?

Don’t you feel that the series of steps is too long? In fact, there are a total of 6 steps before your target audience can complete the goal.

With such a long conversion funnel, your target audience is likely to leave midway. They may even exit your website at step 4! This is one reason why your marketing campaigns are not performing as well as expected – you’ve invested money to send traffic to your website only to have visitors dropping off in the middle of the conversion funnel.

A simple way to solve this issue is to create a short conversion funnel. Based on the above example, you can shorten the series of steps to this:

Landing on your website

Filling in a form with their contact details and submitting it

Arriving on a page where they can download the brochure

Do you notice the difference?

A shorter conversion funnel creates less opportunities for visitors to leave. Likewise, a longer conversion funnel opens up more opportunities for visitors to leave.

2. Your website is not mobile-friendly

The rapid growth of mobile usage has led to it becoming one of the top channels of communication and engagement with our customers. Hence, we should not neglect mobile traffic when planning our marketing campaigns. Most importantly, you need to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, the number of leads you get from mobile might be low. While you could exclude mobile traffic from your marketing campaigns, you could miss out on potential customers who visit your website on their mobile devices. Your prospective clients may even turn to your competitors if they have a mobile-friendly website.

To avoid getting trapped in this vicious cycle, you need to consider the interests of your mobile users and provide the best user experience to visitors.

Some common problems that your mobile users may encounter are screen size issues (if your website is not able to adapt to the small screen size of mobile) and navigation issues (mobile users may find it difficult to navigate your website). The solution to this is to create a mobile-friendly website.

3. Slow loading time

Every second counts, especially so for people visiting a website. Slow loading time is one of the top reasons visitors leave a website. Be honest. Wouldn’t you click the back button if a website is taking too long to load? You will, won’t you? Just like how time is precious to you, time is also precious to your visitors.

One way to check if your website is taking too long to load is to visit your website yourself. Do check every page on your website to see which page takes the longest to load. You can use different web browsers to access your website to see if there are any differences in the loading time.

A better way, however, is to view the data the web analytics solution implemented on your website had collected. Google Analytics is one web analytics solution we highly recommend due to its detailed statistics. There is a site speed overview report under the behavior tab that allows you to view the average page load time by browser, country and page. This method will save you time compared to checking the loading time manually.

Therefore, to not incur the wrath of your visitors by testing the limits of their patience, you need to check your loading time every now and then. Prevent your visitors from clicking that back button by speeding up your website and improving your site speed.

Conclusion

We have only examined a few reasons why your marketing efforts fail. There are still numerous reasons why your marketing campaigns did not work. The most important lesson is to broaden your scope and consider other reasons (not only marketing strategy or tactics) that have led to your campaigns falling short of the desired results.

Have you ever experienced the situation where your marketing campaign is not producing the expected outcomes? Discover how you can easily identify the reasons that caused your marketing efforts to be unsuccessful. Sign up for a free consultation today and let our consultants review your online marketing campaign.